How to Stand Up to a Dictator Quotes

“Democracy is fragile. You have to fight for every bit, every law, every safeguard, every institution, every story. You must know how dangerous it is to suffer even the tiniest cut. This is why I say to us all: we must hold the line.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

“Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without all three, we have no shared reality, and democracy as we know it—and all meaningful human endeavors—are dead.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

“If you're lucky, you realize early on that each decision you make answers a question that all of us muddle through: how to build meaning in our lives. Meaning is not something you stumble across or what someone gives you; you build it through every choice you make, the commitments you choose, the people you love, and the values you hold dear.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator

“Silence is complicity because silence is consent. “What we’re seeing is death by a thousand cuts of our democracy,” I continued. “And I appeal to you to join me. . . . I’ve always said that when I look back a decade from now, I want to make sure—” My voice broke then, so I repeated the sentence. “I want to make sure that I have done all I can. We will not duck. We will not hide. We will hold the line.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

“So how do you stand up to a dictator? By embracing values, defined early—they’re the subtitles of the chapters you’ve read: honesty, vulnerability, empathy, moving away from emotions, embracing your fear, believing in the good. You can’t do it alone. You have to create a team, strengthen your area of influence. Then connect the bright spots and weave a mesh together. Avoid thinking in terms of 'us against them.' Stand in someone else’s shoes. And do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator

“there is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

“Impunity online naturally led to impunity offline, destroying existing checks and balances.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

“When you take a risk, you have to trust that someone will come to your aid; and when it’s your turn, you will help someone else. It’s better to face your fear than to run from it because running won’t make the problem go away. When you face it, you have the chance to conquer it. That was how I began to define courage.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

“What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth?”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

“Tech sucked up our personal experiences and data, organized it with artificial intelligence, manipulated us with it, and created behavior at a scale that brought out the worst in humanity.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator

“It's better to face your fear than to run from it. Because running from it won't take away the fear. When you face it, you have the chance to conquer it.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator

“You can’t have integrity of elections if you don’t have integrity of facts.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

“Today, an emergent wave of right-wing populist leaders uses social media to question and break down reality, triggering rage and paranoia on a bed of exponential lies. This is how fascism is normalized and where political outrage meets terrorism, the vanguard of mass violence.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator

“To social media platforms, I said, “Your business model has divided societies and weakened democracies. Personalization says my reality is different from yours, and we can all have our realities. But all these realities have to coexist in the public sphere. You can’t tear us apart to the point that we don’t agree on facts.” They didn’t listen, and we’re worse off today. I asked journalists and activists to stay the course, and we have—with great sacrifice.43”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

“This is why propaganda networks are so effective in rewriting history: the distribution spread of a lie is so much greater than the fact-check that follows, and by the time the lie is debunked, those who believe it often refuse to change their views, matching social media’s impact on behavior in other parts of the world.26”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

“Facebook didn’t only provide a platform for those propagandists’ speech or even only enable them; in fact, it gave them preferential treatment because anger is the contagious currency of Facebook’s current machine. Only anger, outrage, and fear lead to greater numbers of people using Facebook more times a day. Violence has made Facebook rich.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator

“Without facts, you can't have truth. Without truth, you can't have trust.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator

“Online violence is real-world violence.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator

“Some days, I feel like Sisyphus and Cassandra combined, trying to repeatedly warn the world about how social media has destroyed our shared reality, the place where democracy happens.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

“Every development that happens in my country eventually happens in the rest of the world—if not tomorrow, then a year or two later.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

“What gets our attention is what gives our lives meaning. Where we spend our time determines what we accomplish and what we become good at.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator

“The world we once knew is decimated. Now we have to decide what we want to create.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

“people like you if you give them what they want. The question is: Is it what you want?”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

“Elie Wiesel warned us that there may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. Maria’s legacy will be felt for generations—because she never failed to protest, to try to bend the arc of history toward justice. And when young Filipino students study history, they will find that the first Filipino person ever to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize was a courageous journalist determined to tell the truth. I hope that, for the sake of future generations, they will be inspired by her example.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

“There are solutions: in the long term, the most important thing is education, so start now; in the medium term, it’s legislation and policy to restore the rule of law in the virtual world—to create a vision of the internet that binds us together instead of tearing us apart. In the short term, now, it’s just us: collaborate, collaborate, collaborate. And that begins with trust.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

“Until today, Marcos has denied any connection to “trolls,”22 despite the data that we at Rappler exposed in a three-part Marcos propaganda series in 2019. Not so subtly, the messaging on his social media accounts began with changing the past. To begin with, he repeatedly lied about his education at Oxford University and Wharton. After being caught in the lie by a Rappler exclusive,23 his Senate office quietly changed his résumé on the Senate website, but he doubled down on the lie,24 a lesson many people, including Donald Trump and Mark Zuckerberg, have learned is easily facilitated by social media. His disinformation network also hijacked popular pages and news groups with copied-and-pasted comments that slowly chipped away at the legacy of the Aquino family, long seen as his family’s nemesis—all”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

“Our group has come together for one purpose,” Shoshana said. “We demand comprehensive action to ensure that Facebook cannot be weaponized to undermine the vote and with it American democracy.” We decided that instead of making broad, lofty demands, we would focus first on quickly actionable points,8 especially given the tight timeline and Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior. We distilled them down to three demands of Facebook: to enforce its own policies and remove posts inciting violence; to ban ads that seek to delegitimize election results; and to take measures to prevent disinformation and misinformation about the election results. It was a sign of the times that within twenty-four hours, Facebook acted on all of them. It never admitted it, though. Instead, it attacked our members. In those months, much of what Rappler had discovered about Facebook and social media based on our own data and research, as well as many of our suspicions, was slowly being confirmed by reporters, whistleblowers, and even the companies themselves.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

“Today, I’m beyond disillusioned. I believe that Facebook represents one of the gravest threats to democracies around the world, and I am amazed that we have allowed our freedoms to be taken away by technology companies’ greed for growth and revenues.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

“Staying silent or compliant changed nothing. Speaking up was an act of creation.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future

“In an autocracy, a journalist’s opponent is the state—which makes policy, controls the police, hires the prosecutors, and readies the prisons. It has an army of bots active online to vilify and undermine anyone deemed an opponent. It has the power to take down broadcasters and online sites. Most important: it has a need to control the message in order to survive. Its existence depends on ensuring that there is only one side to every story.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future